Sitting in chairs under blankets and wearing almost all of our clothes, we shivered in the desert night, and gazed upwards while our guide, physically skipping with enthusiasm for his subject, relayed the history of mankind's fascination with the night sky, the planets and the revolutions of them in relation to our earth, and, ultimately, ourselves. He explains the gradual, step by step transformation in the way humans have viewed the shape and movement of the earth, and the terrifying effect it had on many of our more ancient compatriots, threatening belief systems, power balances and, in the end, our own, ever shaky, sense of our place in this universe.
And well it might. Sitting, gazing upwards, understanding the galaxies within galaxies, the planets with their own moons, weather systems and natural resources, and the movement of the sky, which is, after all, only a movement of ourselves, so imperceptible and yet fast enough for the seven powerful telescopes in our guide's back garden to require readjustment within five or ten minutes in order to remain trained on a particular object, is terrifying - or at least - awesome, in the literal sense of the word.
It is, quite truly, another world up there.
Our guide uses a powerful light beam as a pointer to show us the Southern night sky, something we cannot see well from our little island in the northern hemisphere. He points out the Southern Cross, which guides sailors by acting as a marker from which to place themselves in relation to the south pole, and the False Cross, which confuses them in those times when the Southern Cross is below our horizon. He points out the brightest stars in the sky, including Sirius, my personal favourite, which blazes above the Southern hemisphere.
Then he begins to focus the telescopes and I am simply not prepared for how amazed I will be. I look at clusters of bright stars which, with the naked eye, form only an empty space in the sky. I see Sirius, not as a blinking dot, but as a fireballs, blazing bright yellow, white and, sometimes, a fiery blue. I look at the 'Jewel Box' a cluster of stars so named for their twinkling colours, which glow red, green, gold and crimson.
We are all frozen, no longer able to feel our feet, but dumbstruck by what we are seeing.
"Wow", we say, and our ability to use other vocabulary is swallowed up by the enormity of the universe we look at.
And this is before he begins to train the telescopes on the planets.
Jupiter, with its stripes visible, and all four of its moons circulating in their various ellipses, beams down at us. I can't fathom a world so completely other.
Saturn is so clear it looks as though I could reach into the telescope and pluck it out of the sky to pop into my mouth like a penny sweet. (An odd metaphor I know, but that's just how it felt).
Finally, and with a flourish, our guide trains two telescopes carefully into the sky and announces,
" and now - the best of all!"
He has made this same announcement several times so far, though admittedly, it always has been fairly fantastic, each better even than the last, and so it is not that I don't respond, more that I simply queue up for the newly trained telescope with the same level of excitement as I have for everything else.
When I first put my eye to it I simply see white and nearly pull away again, thinking I might be looking through the wrong eye piece. I am not, however, and when I do focus, the brightness almost hurts my eyes. When I blink the tears away and try again I gasp.
I am looking, as you may have guessed, at the moon. I can see craters and textures, shadows and lines. It is absolutely amazing. What is more, with the help of our, ever more amazing, guide I even manage to get a photo.
I don't have the words to tell you quite how amazing this evening was and so - I will revert to uploading a photo.
Ladies and Gentlemen - behold - The Moon...
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